How we were twenty years ago
About the Internet and curiosity
The other day I happened to read this article about the 90’s underground culture and it kinda had a strong impact on me. It was a doubtfully interesting piece of writing, yet the images were so powerful. They were from different photographers, some of them famous, others not.
Watching them made me realize even though I was born during the 90s, I can’t remember a damn thing of the world before the internet took over.
So, what impressed me the most was seeing this bunch of youngsters, more or less my age, hanging out on the streets, in a crowded plaza, with their skateboards, a bottle of Coke in the hand and their loose jeans and hoodies. Smoking, chatting, as we could do today. Yet we don’t.
I don’t remember seeing a large group of youngsters hanging out on the street in a random afternoon in a long time. I mean, they exist, I guess especially in the suburbs. But fuck, it was a lot more common 20 or 15 years ago. Because there was no alternative. They couldn’t just stay cozy at home, chatting on WhatsApp groups. They had to go out to see each other, to interact with people and have a social life.
I can’t remember what did it mean to just hang out on the streets with your friends, I don’t know what does it mean to go home after a day out and be by myself. None of us knows. We check our Facebook, WhatsApp, we surf the internet in every moment of solitude. When we are in the toilet, when we drink coffee, when we are on the bus or lying in bed. I mean not every second, but surely at least once per hour.
Imagine you had a crush, back then. You wouldn’t scroll his/her Facebook profile to get to know her/him. You had to get out and hopefully meet him/her. You had to gravitate around his/her favourite places and your common friends. Today, if we have a crush on someone, it is enough to look at our smartphones to fulfil our curiosity and our interest.
I think this is profoundly ill. I mean, I am not judging, because I do that every day. Even the words I’m typing in couldn’t exist and couldn’t be spread if the whole Internet thing wasn’t going on. But, what about those teenagers? Weren’t they a bit more sincere and tough than us? And I think that’s due to that: the way we now perceive curiosity and interest.
It was much harder back then to be curious about something or someone.
You couldn’t just go on Wikipedia if you wanted to know everything about a person, place, movement. You had to go to a library or a bookstore and search for some information. We don’t experience that feeling anymore. The enthusiasm of finding a book on your favourite movie director, the first record of your favourite band. Do we even know? It’s quite the same with people. And it’s scary. The difficulty of fulfilling our curiosity made us appreciate what we had found a lot more. That’s why even love has become cheaper today.
I don’t want to sound apocalyptic, I’ll just use this example. Imagine you want to listen to a song. And you have no clue where you can find it, because the record is old and your city’s store doesn’t have it. None of your friend does. So you decide to travel to a bigger city, and randomly explore all the record stores. After a whole amount of time, effort and disappointment, you find it. What you’ve been looking for months is right there in your hands.
How do you appreciate it? Would it be the same as listening to it on Spotify?
Eventually, I believe in love and I believe that my generation has high values and good intentions. I only desire strongly to be able to appreciate every good thing as I would have appreciate that record. I just want that everybody could think about it, because the Internet is powerful and it’s a blessing. But we must remember what came first, because the world hasn’t always looked like this.
We must learn how to use this instrument and not passively let it shape our life. We shall fulfil our curiosity in many different ways.
We shall know what it means to fight for things we don’t have to fight for anymore in order to appreciate them, and be happy.
